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I live on a reservation where I see many battles.
Even while I watch my little boy fight imaginary foes with a wooden sword, I am praying for my brothers and sisters in Christ who are fighting the battles of addiction, grief, loneliness, rejection, generational trauma, and hopelessness.
Those foes rise up with intimidating strength to snuff out goodness, truth, and beauty. One smiling, laughing little girl was transformed to a shadowy figure hovering in a dark doorway, fighting battles that no one can survive on their own.
“Come,” we invited, and she couldn’t. We called again, and still, the battle raged. We invited her a third time, and light was kindled again in her darkness, illuminating the battle so that we could see to join the fray.
And we fought beside her in worship. As we sang to the King of Kings together with this hurting child, her morose silence thawed into watery pools of grief. Her grief warmed into pain. And then, as George MacDonald writes, “How much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy, alone, cannot unfold the deepest truths…sorrow, stooping and wan, cometh, flinging wide the doors she may not enter.”
Sorrow opened the door to joy for this child, and now, I watch her face as we worship Jesus together. She smiles, with true joy sparkling from her eyes.
Advent is the fight for joy, the long resistance of the snuffing out of hope, the much anticipated, victorious return of love.
Brother Andrew, the well-known Bible smuggler, wrote that Advent has been a struggle since the very beginning. It is the final battle in the War that Satan has waged against the goodness of God: “A lot was at stake in all of the stories of the Old Testament! If Nehemiah had not been able to build the wall to protect the Temple and houses in Jerusalem, then Christmas would not have taken place!”
We might think of Advent as the dreamy, cozy, religious time leading up to Christmas, but in reality, the coming of Christ was as a warrior stepping into the hopelessness of time.
And poet Malcolm Guite reminds us that Advent is not only about the time leading up to remembering the birth of Christ: “But surely, between this beginning [the original Advent] and this end [the second Advent of Christ at His return], there are many other advents. ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age,’ says Jesus…In our encounters with the poor and the stranger, in the mystery of the sacraments, in those unexpected moments of transfiguration surely there is also an advent and Christ comes to us. Perhaps that is why the other sense we have of the word ‘advent’ is to find it beginning the word ‘adventure.’”
Advent means it is time to draw our swords. It is time to adventure to the battle. It is time to put an end to the suffering of those who have no hope, joy, or love.
Jesus has come. Join the fray. Victory is sure.
Sarah Dixon Young 